Philosophical Exercises

  In June 2025, I meditated alongside David Whyte’s poetry on the “meanings, paradoxes, and complexities of everyday words.”   His essays moved me, but I regret how I went about the exercise. Image by Karen Arnold Consolations, by David Whyte, is a course you can find on the Waking Up app, a very good philosophy-oriented meditation & spirituality app. The course itself is essentially the audio book version of a book of essays bearing the same name: Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words . The essays are close to poems, at least when being read aloud by the author, and each audio clip in this series is one such poem. In the introduction to the series, David Whyte explains the reasoning and creative process that birthed these essays. Through this explanation, we get the blueprint that, for our purpose, we can identify as a “ philosophical exercise ”. One that could be called “finding consolation in everyday words”. David Wh...

One of my all time favourite philosophers, Helen de Cruz, passed away recently. I wanted to write a little something to honour their memory, and especially to highlight one striking feature of their philosophy: how inspiring it is, and how it is meant to inspire.   Helen de Cruz’s work covers a lot of areas, and I shall not pretend to be very familiar with all of this. So I am not offering to do a full retrospective, or to measure the extent of their life's work. If you want some idea of how broad their interests were, and how much they accomplished professionally for the sake of the philosophical community: take a look at   this lovely tribute , which covers a lot more ground than I will. Though I think everyone agrees that any tribute about them is only very partial. Instead, I shall focus on only one aspect of their work, which is this call that they put out there, this call for self-actualiza t ion . Their declining health gave them a sense of urgency that prompted t...

I took two months (April & May 2025) to practice a yoga exercise that I had tried before (February 2024) but with mixed results. The exercise consists in practicing yoga poses while being attentive to specific phenomenological insights that they disclose; insights which are handily listed in an amazing article by Hayden Kee 1 . My first try with this practice was only half successful, but coming back to it allowed me to unlock what had eluded me: a sense of openness, of daringness… strangely, a sense of relationship towards the sky. The key was patience, discipline, and enjoying the journey. To be honest, enjoyment did the heavy lifting and carried the other two virtues. On the importance of taking your time If you recall, when last I explored the phenomenological insights disclosed by postural yoga , I only managed to gain insights related to the sense of earth : feeling grounded, bound by gravity, supported, secure. But the corollary sense of sky – the feeling of opennes...

Summary: I am taking my time to experiment with the sense of sky in modern postural yoga. Halfway through this experiment, I can say that several other philosophical exercises contributed to enriching my felt-worldview with a sense of open sky above me, and so they helped make the yoga exercise (which I find pretty challenging) easier. A little while ago, over the span of a month, I experimented with  modern postural yoga,   in order to feel the insights it can deliver.   The result of that experiment was that I felt only half of what I was trying to feel. Indeed, these insights can be split into two categories: the “sense of earth” and the “sense of sky”, and I only accessed the first. The sense of earth means feeling grounded, bound by gravity, secure. I managed to feel that one and it was quite nice. On the other hand, the sense of sky is whatever feeling of openness comes to challenge/complete this sense of earth. I think of it this way: if you feel secure enou...